The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web (Paperback)

by Bo Leuf (Author), Ward Cunningham (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Suitable for system administrators or managers seeking an affordable content-management solution, The Wiki Way shows off how to take advantage of Wiki collaborative software, which allows users to post and edit content remotely. This book is all you need to get up and running with this exciting (and free) way to build and manage content.

This text is first and foremost a guide to what Wiki software is and how to install, customize, and administer it within your organization. Early sections discuss the advantages of Wiki Web sites, which allow all users to add and edit content. While it might sound like a free-for-all, the authors suggest such Web sites have been used successfully in research, business, and education to document project designs, for brainstorming, and for otherwise creating content in a collaborative fashion. Case studies for such organizations as Georgia Tech, New York Times Digital, and Motorola give a glimpse of Wiki used in real settings, so you will get a sense of what to expect.

This book is also a guide to the nuts and bolts of downloading and installing Wiki and customizing it for your site. Sections on basic tweaks to Wiki's Perl scripts will let you customize your site to match your organization's needs. Standout material includes almost three dozen customization tips. This volume is illustrated with actual screen shots of Wiki, so you can get a sense of what it is like for users to work together in such an unrestricted fashion.

Throughout the text, the authors are suitably upbeat about Wiki's prospects for wider adoption, but they are realistic enough to note compromises (such as requiring passwords and restricting edit rights) required in business settings. They also survey the field of Wiki open-source projects and clones, as well as other similar content-management solutions (such as Zope and the emerging WebDAV standard).

While it's hard to predict whether Wiki-based Web sites are for everyone, this book presents the pros and cons of a potentially exciting and useful tool that promotes collaborative content creation. This title can help any organization get going with a Wiki Web site, from the standpoint of planning, deployment, and basic administration. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

• Collaboration tools explained
• Web-based collaboration
• WebDAV
• Introduction to Wiki
• User conventions with Wiki
• Survey of Wiki open-source projects and clones
• Installing Wiki (including Apache Web Server and security issues)
• Using Wiki (making notes, Wiki used as a PIM, content management and links, page editing)
• How to structure Wiki content (suggested default structure: pros and cons)
• Customizing Wiki
• Tour of Wiki Perl scripts and tips for customizing your Wiki site
• Wiki add-ons (including spellchecking and uploading files)
• Administration in Wiki (viewing events, controlling access and authentication, database administration, and debugging techniques)
• Guidelines for Wiki projects (dos and don'ts)
• Wiki case studies for education
• Business and research

Product Description
Offers readers all of the information needed to understand, set up, run, and use a Wiki server, beginning with a tutorial on setting up Wiki, with background information. The CD-ROM contains the public license Wiki sources discussed in the text, as well as several case studies. System requirements not listed. Softcover. DLC: Wiki (Computer science).

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (April 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 020171499X
• ISBN-13: 978-0201714999
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #271,375 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What creates the sense of community?, July 24, 2002

By	Richard Leir "leirtech.com" (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

What creates the sense of community that you feel in certain newsgroups, mailing lists, or IRC's? What drives people to gather there? If you find this question interesting, then look at Wiki: it is an example of a strong community on the web.

Wiki (the collaboration tool) can be thought of as a lightweight WebDAV (web Distributed Authoring and Versioning)
without n levels of standards committees. In a Wiki site, every page can be edited by anybody, and new page links 'spring into existence' automatically just by RunningCapitalizedWordsTogether. This simple concept, created by Ward Cunningham, is surprisingly powerful. The technology behind it is also simple, and the wiki code that makes this work is written in perl, so if you want to add a feature or tweak it, then you can 'hack it'.

A visit to the original Wiki web site can be very rewarding, at [1]. At this site, the community includes many experts in Design Patterns and Extreme Programming (XP). You will find literate discussions on software and life in general.

Laird Cameron describes Wiki well in his Open Sources column [2].

This book is an overview of Wiki, and a detailed how-to look at the code. The book is casual and informal, well suited to the wiki culture. It explains the thought processes which went into the design of wiki planning, deployment, and basic administration. The book contains case studies from academia and the corporate world. The accompanying CD will get you going quickly.

You will want to read this book, if:
- In the corporate world, you want your group to pull together and create a knowledge base.
- For the design of your software product, you want to understand group dynamics.
- In the academic world, you want an online meeting place for course work or peer review.
- You are studying the design and implementation of collaborative tools.
- For your personal use, you need a notebook that goes with you wherever there is a web browser.

Wiki's perl source can be hard to read,
and you will be wanting to change it.
Maybe Wiki is an entertainment for your spare time,
and then you can just play around with it.
However, you probably need this book if you are
deploying a wiki at work.

This book presents a relaxed, 'democratic' approach to Information Architecture. It encourages you to provide minimal structure: the inclusion of a search function, a recent changes page, users' mini-bios, and links to return to the top. The wiki users are encouraged to structure the content, and this book suggests how they might be encouraged to do so.

For counterpoint see Rosenfeld [3] who describes how to structure a conventional web site: organize information, help navigation, label the content, configure the search system, and manage the process.

I was interested by the discussion of the many Wiki clones, in Perl, SmallTalk, Java, and others. Everyone has different preferences for UI features and implementation.

Also interesting was part 3, which discusses the Wiki culture.
Wiki has fostered strong community spirit among those who have
contributed to its design and implementation.
People express diverse opinions yet work together well.
Compare this 'atmosphere' with that of of some news groups where
flames are common. When you set up a Wiki for use by your colleagues or students, you need to understand the group dynamics of a successful collaboration site, and this part of the book will help you to encourage people to take roles and get involved, thereby extending the community.

I have a few quibbles about the book and CD.
- Readers will want to visit the book's errata page [4] before using the CD.
- There is a 64 page subsection, with one contents entry, which is hard to navigate other than to read it sequentially (it spans pages 143 to 207).
- The source code examples in the book have an indentation width of one space (though the source on CD is formatted correctly).
- The book and CD are intended for users of MS Windows, which is unusual when discussing open source. This quibble is very minor, as the book and CD are platform neutral in most ways.

The book gets five stars at Amazon and a good review at Fatbrain. Recommended! At your bookstore, look for the cover drawing by M.C. Escher of two drawing hands, with nifty reflection effects.

By the way, you will have already heard of the untimely demise of Douglas Adams. His Guide to the Galaxy, similar to a Wiki, lives on at www.h2g2.com.

[1] www.c2.com/cgi/wiki

[2] Server/Workstation Expert Magazine, March 2001:
swexpert.com/CC/SE.C12.MAR.01.pdf

[3] Rosenfeld and Morville _Information Architecture_, O'Reilly

[4] the errata page: wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WikiWayErrata

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The bible for the wiki community, May 2, 2001

By	Helmut Leitner (Graz, Austria) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book describes the technology and culture of the wiki open web authoring system. The CD-ROM contains all the necessary software to install a wiki and one third of the book explains how the software does it's magic and how it might be expanded to do even more. The first part contains a step-by-step introduction to the wiki ideas and culture and the last part tells about the wiki experiences in the corporate world and at universities.

The book is written extremely well and easy to follow, sometimes even entertaining. It touches all important aspects of installing and maintaining a wiki server and of running a wiki community. During the last 8 months I did many of the things described based on my own explorations and using a different software. This books would have saved me many weeks of labour. I may lack objectivity, but this book is bound to become the bible for the wiki world.

What's to criticize? First: there is almost no hype in this book, too little for the lots of enthusiastic users out there. Second: the book offers a baseline system, some clones and lots of optional extensions and invites to experiment. I think that most readers would prefer a full-featured proven standard system out of the box. Third: it's conservative approach about some features - like edit conflict resolution or page deletion - shows how quickly things are moving.

Is this criticism correct? I don't know, you decide. To me, it's an excellent book. It's the important, long awaited reference. It's the landmark showing that the wiki is about to change from an insider tip to an established technology. It clearly deserves 5 (*****) stars. If you are interested in wiki, online communities or knowledge management at all, you must know this book.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars good introduction to wiki concepts but assumes perl, September 9, 2003

By	Frank Carver (Ipswich, Suffolk United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

A "Wiki" is a web site, where every page is editable, by anybody with a browser. It may seem wierd, but it's a very powerful, and successful, idea. The most well-known Wiki has been running since 1994 with thousands of users.

This book covers how and why Wiki works, case studies of use, and installing, configuring, and customizing an open-source Wiki supplied on CD. If you know a little about Wiki, and want more, this is a great book. It's sprinkled with practical advice and gives real code examples for enhancements. It can also be inspirational and has got me buzzing with ideas. It has a fine index and all the "tips" are listed for easy reference.

Wiki's obscurity is its greatest weakness, though. If you have never heard the term "Wiki", you would never think to pick up this book. I also found that the assumption of Perl in the example software sections clashed with the language independent nature of the theory and case-study sections. And beware that the book ignores or glosses over a few things which require more effort than in other systems.

If you find it clumsy or slow to get things on a web site, if you are looking for an easy way to let people collaborate, or if you just want to make sense of all your scattered notes, read this book.